Bates faces up to flower power

The latest financial shenanigans at Leeds United leave many more questions than answers

OUTSIDE Leeds United’s Elland Road ground flowers have been stacked around the statue of club legend Billy Bremner as supporters plead for an end to the three months of turmoil that have engulfed Yorkshire’s once-great footballing power-house.

Fans have set up a “Love Leeds, Hate Bates” website appealing to tycoon Ken Bates to stand down as chairman of the club “and sell your controlling interest immediately to a party with Leeds United and football at its heart”.

And now Bates’s key business partner finds himself embroiled in a bizarre legal episode. It stems from Bates’s successful move to buy the club back from administrators after it went bust. But this dispute is being played out not in Leeds, but in a court hundreds of miles away in Jersey.

And Mark Taylor, a solicitor and long-standing ally of Bates, has admitted that he claimed to be on the board of Leeds